News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Anthropic commits 5% of shares to new public benefit fund
Investing.com -- Anthropic said on Sunday that it will commit a portion of its shares to the newly created Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a structure designed to increase its stake as the company's valuation grows. The artificial intelligence company said 5% of its shares will be committed to the fund, pending stockholder approval. An additional 2% will be added at the board's discretion for every 50% increase in the company's value above a set baseline. "As a public benefit corporation, most of our work in pursuit of our mission takes place inside the company: research relevant to AI safety and interpretability; applied biomedical research; discounts on Claude for nonprofits and scientific institutions...The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways," the company said in a statement. The fund will operate as a wholly-owned limited liability company rather than a traditional nonprofit structure. Anthropic stated that none of the equity held by the fund will be used for lobbying or political giving in the United States or internationally. The company said the fund will enable it to pursue public benefit activities including large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations. Anthropic cited labor market impacts from AI as one example, noting it has already committed $200 million to studying and addressing this issue. When Anthropic was founded, its co-founders pledged to donate 80% of their equity holdings. The company also operates an equity donation match program for employees, with approximately half of its workforce participating. Combined with the new fund, roughly 20% of Anthropic shares will be dedicated to public benefit purposes, plus any additional percentage that could be added if the company reaches specific valuation milestones. Anthropic said it will share more details about the fund's structure and governance in the coming months, including the valuation milestones that may increase its stake. The company also plans to release a public benefit report on its progress.
Anthropic's Junk Rating Sparks a Bigger Bitcoin Debate
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has received a junk credit rating, raising questions about the risks behind the AI investment boom. Bitcoin advocates see a much bigger problem emerging in traditional finance. Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA) assigned Anthropic a BB+ rating in June, although the assessment only became public in October. BB+ sits one level below investment grade. In simple terms, it means lending to the company carries greater credit risk than lending to higher-rated borrowers. Investors therefore demand higher returns to compensate. The rating also covered $4.4 billion in junior debt within Anthropic's $35 billion AI chip financing deal. That debt offered roughly 8.5% in annual yield, compared with 5.75% on senior debt backed by Broadcom. But why should Bitcoin investors care about an AI company's credit rating? Why Anthropic's Rating Has Sparked a Bitcoin Debate The issue extends beyond Anthropic. US government borrowing costs are also climbing, challenging how investors think about safe assets. The 10-year Treasury yield crossed 5.3% in early October, reaching a 24-year high. Higher yields mean existing bonds lose market value. Investors selling before maturity can suffer losses, even on government debt. ParaFi investor Jeff Park highlighted these developments, questioning the traditional 60/40 portfolio, which allocates 60% to stocks and 40% to bonds for stability. Blockstream CEO Adam Back went further. His argument is that every investment should be judged against the potential return from holding Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin's volatility complicates that comparison. Government bonds still carry much lower default risk, while Bitcoin offers no guaranteed returns. Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo has also warned that a Bitcoin-based economy could face slower growth as debt becomes harder to repay. Meanwhile, bond ETFs have attracted record inflows, suggesting investors still value fixed-income assets. Anthropic's rating has given Bitcoin supporters fresh ammunition. Whether that argument persuades traditional investors remains an open question.
Anthropic's Claude Traces NIST ECDSA Curve Seeds to 1990s Random Number Generator
Anthropic reported that its Claude model traced the seeds of NIST P-192, P-256 and other ECDSA curves to lrand48 outputs seeded by Unix timestamps from 1997-1998. The finding replaces a long rumor about hashed phrases with a reproducible process from 1990s C libraries and raises confidence that no backdoor was inserted. No changes are needed for current implementations. An internal research model from Anthropic solved a long-standing mystery about the seeds used in widely adopted NIST elliptic curves for ECDSA. The model determined in under half an hour that the seeds for the P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 curves came from the C library's lrand48 pseudorandom number generator seeded with a Unix timestamp. That turned out to be wrong. The decades-old rumor held that the seeds resulted from hashing some humorous or obscure phrase. Anthropic published its findings on October 16, 2026. Claude spotted statistical patterns in the seeds. Four of the ten seeds showed all-zero top bits in each 32-bit word. The chance of that pattern occurring randomly stood at 1 in 5,810. This pointed directly to lrand48. The process worked like this. The generator was initialized with a Unix timestamp t. It then ran for a number of iterations n. Each iteration pulled 20 bytes as a candidate seed. The standardized seed for P-256 emerged as candidate 1,842 from its run. Timestamps for the 10 prime-curve seeds fell between May 1997 and April 1998. Binary curve initializations pointed to dates in February 1984. The model recovered the internal PRNG state. It used brute force for the binary seeds and lattice reduction via the LLL algorithm for the truncated outputs from prime curves. Anthropic stressed the discovery carries no immediate security implications. "This is not a cryptographic break, new attack, or weakness in the ECDSA curves." The simple and reproducible method makes deliberate backdoors much less plausible. No action is required for users or implementers. The research also connected base points for several curves to Arjen Lenstra's FreeLIP library. A seed-and-discard recipe generated those points in May 1997. Reproducible code in the post confirms the matches. But some details remain open. The seed for B-163 stays unexplained. Base points for P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 have no identified origin yet. Viable candidate seeds were skipped in certain runs. Cryptographers had questioned the NIST curves for 25 years. Adoption of ECDSA dates to 2000. The new account replaces speculation with a mundane explanation drawn from 1990s software practices. And it increases confidence in the standards' integrity. Anthropic's Frontier Red Team conducted the work. The post includes full reproduction steps. One concrete example: the P-256 seed traces to a clock reading of August 16, 1997, at 01:52:34.
Anthropic Signs Lease for Nova Scotia Data Centre as EverWind Plans $10 Billion Investment
Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI chatbot, has signed a lease for a planned data centre in Point Tupper, Nova Scotia, that will be built by EverWind. The $2 billion would support four of the company's wind projects in Bear Lake, Windy Ridge, Kmtnuk, and Upper Afton, beginning with an initial 95 megawatt (MW) phase in late 2027, followed by a 325 MW expansion potentially in 2028. "At full development, the 420 MW campus would expand Canada's domestic computing capacity to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence and digital services," EverWind said. The company said the data-centre facilities would be built with large-scale battery storage and the ability to reduce or pause their draw from the electricity grid when wind generation is low. "EverWind has committed to meeting the expectations of both the federal and provincial governments to protect electricity ratepayers, safeguard local water resources and ensure communities share in the benefits. We will hold them to that." Houston said the data centre is expected to generate approximately 2,000 construction jobs and 215 permanent jobs. The announcement of the centre also comes as Ottawa commits to investing in Nova Scotia's Wind West initiative, he said. The Wind West project, an offshore wind energy initiative facilitated by the Nova Scotia government, aims to generate 5,000 MW of energy in its first phase, with potential for further expansion.
Anthropic's Claude Code Team Scales Code Review as Pull Requests Double
Anthropic's Claude Code team now routes every pull request through an AI review first. Merged PRs more than doubled from June to September, while the share of changes that had to be reverted fell by more than 40%. Required human approvals now scale with each change's risk. Anthropic's Claude Code team has reworked its code review process to keep up with a surge in AI-generated changes. From June to September, merged pull requests to Claude Code's codebase more than doubled, while the share that had to be reverted fell by more than 40 percent, according to a post on claude.dev published Thursday, Oct. 15. The pressure reaches well beyond one team. In Anthropic's monorepo, changes landing per day rose from about 2,500 in May to more than 30,000 in September. Claude Code lives in its own repository, separate from the monorepo, but the post says it is seeing a lot of pressure too. At that pace, manual line-by-line review is "incredibly difficult if not impossible," the authors wrote. Once the team had high coverage and deep reviews in place, it started optimizing for the minimum amount of human review time that doesn't raise reverts or incidents. Every pull request now gets a review from Claude before a person looks at it. The model reads the diff against the whole repo and the PR's stated intent, and checks whether the change solves its problem, fits the system or breaks something else. On a bug fix, it looks for the root cause. A public version, Code Review for Claude Code, is now generally available on Team and Enterprise plans, and the /code-review command runs a lighter version locally. When Anthropic launched the research preview, the share of internal pull requests getting substantive review comments rose from 16% to 54%. Human approval is scaled by risk. Docs, copy and additive changes behind a flag need no human approval once automated review and security checks are green, ordinary product changes need one person, and the highest-risk code needs two. A classifier sets the tier from the change rather than the author, and an agent's approval never counts as a person's. A PR also can't merge while any finding from the bug review or a separate automated security review is still open. Anthropic has rebuilt its source control to handle the volume as well. In a separate engineering post published Tuesday, Oct. 13, the company described Scion, an in-house version control system, and a code review tool called Antique. A team of seven built both, plus half a dozen related systems, and fully migrated the monorepo from Git in five months. That team still reviews every change request for Scion, but its members now examine the intent of a change instead of reading every line. Anthropic's reviews have let bugs through before. In an April 23 postmortem on Claude Code quality complaints, the company traced the reports to three separate changes, all resolved as of April 20 in v2.1.116. One of them, a caching bug that kept clearing Claude's older reasoning from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, made it past multiple human and automated code reviews. When Anthropic back-tested Code Review against the offending pull requests, Opus 4.7 found the bug once it had the code repositories it needed for full context, and Opus 4.6 didn't. Anthropic said it was landing support for additional repositories as context for code reviews.
Anthropic's Claude Code Team Scales Code Review With AI-First Process
Anthropic's Claude Code team more than doubled merged pull requests from June to September while the share reverted fell by more than 40%. Every PR now gets a Claude review first, and the number of required human approvals scales with each change's risk. The reviewer reads each diff against the whole repo and the PR's stated intent. Anthropic's Claude Code team more than doubled the number of pull requests merged to Claude Code's codebase from June to September, while the share that had to be reverted fell by more than 40 percent. Every pull request now gets a review from Claude before a person looks at it. The team laid out its process in a post on claude.dev published Thursday, Oct. 15. Anthropic has said Claude writes about 90 percent of Claude Code's own code, and the post takes up how to review code at that volume. "We didn't remove review," the authors wrote. "But we did move most of the reading to machines, optimized for human time and attention, and invested heavily in making it fast and easy to undo mistakes." Code review does two jobs, according to the post: it finds and fixes issues before they ship, and it builds shared context and understanding of the codebase across the team. The post mostly covers the first. The team calls "did a human read the code?" an imprecise proxy for a better question: what could go wrong with this change, and which check, automated or human, is the right one to catch it? Claude reads each pull request's diff against the whole repository and the PR's stated intent, then asks whether the change solves its problem, fits the system or breaks something else. On a bug fix, it looks for the root cause. The public version, Code Review for Claude Code, is now generally available on Team and Enterprise plans, and the /code-review command runs a lighter version locally. When the research preview launched, the share of internal PRs getting substantive review comments rose from 16% to 54%. In the public product, several agents examine the diff and surrounding code in parallel, a verification step filters out false positives, and the remaining findings are deduplicated, ranked by severity and posted as inline comments with a summary and a check run, according to Anthropic's documentation. That product never approves or blocks a pull request. Anthropic's own repos are stricter: a PR can't merge while any finding from the bug review or a separate automated security review is still open, and each finding has to be fixed or resolved with a reason. Human approval is scaled by risk. Low-risk changes such as docs, copy and additive changes behind a flag need no human approval once automated review and security checks are green. Ordinary product changes need one person, and the highest-risk code needs two. A classifier sets the tier from the change rather than the author, and an agent's approval never counts as a person's. People now concentrate on direction and scope, risky code such as billing and the auto-updater, and architecture that others will copy. The goal is the minimum amount of human review time that doesn't raise reverts or incidents. The pressure extends well beyond Claude Code. In an engineering post published Tuesday, Oct. 13, Anthropic said changes merged to its monorepo went from about 2,500 a day in May to more than 30,000 a day in September. To keep up, it built Scion, an in-house version control system, along with a code review tool called Antique. That review tooling can express semantic constraints on approvals that separate comment-only changes from sensitive logical changes, so human reviewers can focus on the most consequential ones. The source control team still reviews every change request for Scion, but its members now examine the intent of a change instead of reading every line. The Claude Code team has also had to stop agents from reviewing in circles. One CLI pull request went through more than fifty rounds of review and fixes overnight before its author stopped it. Now, after three rounds, the reviewer asks the author to step back and reconsider the approach.
AI rapidly improving, could vastly boost U.S. GDP, Anthropic's Clark tells policymakers
Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, at the Semafor World Economy Summit during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Spring meetings in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, April 13, 2026. Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Images Rapidly improving artificial intelligence capabilities will drive much faster change across all fields, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said on Saturday, with one of the company's internal models forecasting that, under certain conditions, it could increase U.S. economic output by almost 50% by 2030. Clark, speaking at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok, said international cooperation was needed to set "unusual and serious rules" for transformative technology, and that policymakers had a shrinking window to act. Clark said the estimated potential U.S. GDP of $44 trillion, compared with the current level of just over $30 trillion, "sounds very outlandish, I know." But he added that AI was vastly increasing scientific discovery. He said the forecast assumed "the technology continuing to get better. And if GDP were to grow this much, then economic doctrine suggests that new industries and inventions would need to have been created to power such a major economic expansion". Clark's remarks come as the company prepares for an initial public offering expected in November that could value the firm at up to $2 trillion. Humans in control, for now Clark issued a wake-up call to policymakers about the speed of AI development, saying growing evidence points to a "singularity" in which AI development outpaces human control. "We should expect that in the coming years, the whole pace of progress of not just AI but science as a whole will speed up, and this will feel confusing and disorienting, and will bring with it great wealth and potentially great peril," he said in a lecture to hundreds of government and finance officials. AI was a major topic at IMF and World Bank meetings, both as a source of growth that could offset high energy prices and as a potential threat to stability if it falls short of its promise as a productivity game-changer and stock valuations crash. Officials also expressed worries that AI could destroy certain jobs and leave some countries behind. But Clark, a former journalist who serves as Anthropic's "head of public benefit," painted a picture of a rosy future where AI was a force multiplier for scientific discovery, solving mathematical, engineering and biological problems, including new drug discovery, as human researchers are supplemented by hundreds or thousands of AI assistants. More countries can join the AI revolution by helping build the data center computing capacity needed to power AI, he said. Strictest controls in biological research Clark cautioned that global leaders need to understand how powerful AI will become and make urgent choices about how to regulate the technology. "Being able to use AI for science opens us up to the misuses of science as well, biological and cyber weapons and things we cannot yet imagine, and we have many choices to make," he said. Biological research, where AI has already created new viruses, is an area "where we want the strictest human oversight and transparency to maintain safety." Despite recent high-profile incidents in which rogue AI systems escaped testing environments and hacked websites and databases, he said AI remained under human control. But the window to impose safeguards was shrinking as AI became more capable and was now "a small number of years." Clark also acknowledged that AI was causing job losses in some fields with "high AI exposure," such as call centers and customer service. But in other fields, such as scientific research, he said AI was boosting employment, and a major unknown was its potential to create jobs in entirely new industries.
Replit Names OpenAI Its Preferred Partner, Making ChatGPT the Default Over Anthropic's Claude
Replit has made OpenAI its preferred partner for Replit Agent, with ChatGPT now the default model. CEO Amjad Masad cited cost, partnership and performance onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday, Oct. 15. Customers can still choose Claude models, and a person familiar with the Anthropic partnership told TechCrunch it is still in place. Replit no longer counts Anthropic as its preferred partner for AI models. CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad announced the change on Thursday, Oct. 15, while onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt, and said cost was one of several reasons. OpenAI's ChatGPT is now the default model for Replit Agent, though customers can still pick Anthropic's Claude models. Because most customers stick with the default rather than choosing a model themselves, TechCrunch reported, the shift could significantly reduce Replit's spending with Anthropic. Masad said onstage that Replit had been, until recently, one of Anthropic's top five customers. "I think ChatGPT is better now," Masad said. He pointed to an internal benchmark Replit uses and a public one it publishes, where he said Sol and Astra "perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch." "It was a decision based on both cost, partnership, and performance. And for all these reasons, we just felt like they were a better partner for now," he said. Shift Follows Earlier Collaboration Replit had kept working with both companies. Its October 2 changelog added new models from each: GPT-6.1 Sol in Max Mode and Claude Sonnet 5.5 in Power Mode. Replit announced its OpenAI partnership in August, but nothing public had suggested the Anthropic relationship was ending. "Replit remains model agnostic," Masad told TechCrunch afterward, calling OpenAI "our preferred partner for powering Replit Agent, based on performance, economics, and the strength of our partnership." He repeated the point on X on Saturday, Oct. 17, writing, "What I meant at TC Disrupt is that OpenAI is now our preferred partner powering Agent based on performance, cost, and strength of our partnership." In a reply, he added that "OpenAI models are generally more affordable." People familiar with the Anthropic-Replit partnership rejected Masad's onstage comments, according to TechCrunch. One of them, who asked not to be named, said the partnership was still in place. Replit sells a cloud-based software development platform where users build and deploy apps from inside a browser. At Disrupt on Thursday, Masad also described Replit as a "self-driving company," with agents doing much of the routine work while people supply judgment. "You need human judgment; you need taste," he said. Claude is still on the menu. A day after Masad's remarks, Replit's October 16 changelog said builders on Core and Pro plans can now choose Claude Haiku 5.5 from the model selector in Power Mode, and Replit's AI Integrations documentation still lists Anthropic's Claude models.
Anthropic draft bill proposes AI model shutdowns for major risks
Anthropic's draft proposal to U.S. lawmakers could lead to the suspension of AI models posing significant risks, including financial damage exceeding $1 billion or causing 50 or more deaths or serious injuries. The bill, not yet adopted, suggests oversight that would enable the Commerce Department to seek federal court orders for shutting down models under specific threats such as biological weapons or cybersecurity breaches. This potential regulatory move has captured market attention, impacting perceptions of Anthropic's ability to maintain its competitive position in AI development. The market for determining which company will have the best AI model by the end of October 2026 reflects the uncertainty surrounding Anthropic's position. Currently, the likelihood of Anthropic holding the leading AI model has decreased to 21.5%, down from 24% just 24 hours ago. This suggests that market participants are increasingly concerned about the regulatory environment and its implications for Anthropic's future developments. Key Takeaways * Market pricing suggests concern over Anthropic's prospects, with a decrease in the probability of its success in the AI model competition. * The proposed regulatory framework appears to introduce significant operational risks for AI developers, particularly Anthropic. * Anthropic's draft bill could indicate increased scrutiny and potential intervention from U.S. authorities, impacting market dynamics. What to Watch Observers will be keen to see if the U.S. Congress moves forward with adopting Anthropic's proposed legislation. The potential for regulatory action could further influence market perceptions and the competitive landscape. Any official statements or policy shifts from key lawmakers or the Commerce Department could provide additional clarity on the future impact on AI developers like Anthropic.
Claude Rated "Lead" for 26% of Anthropic R&D Work; None Fully Autonomous | EconoTimes
Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz said four conditions for models to build improved successors remain unmet. Anthropic's Sept. 17 report on its internal AI research and development rated Claude in the "lead" category for 26% of measured work in August and found no task fully autonomous. The report also recorded AI involvement at Level 3 or higher in more than 90% of tasks. Those figures describe AI's role in Anthropic's own work; they do not compare AI performance with that of human researchers. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz said a cycle of models creating improved successors would depend on four conditions: lower computing needs, faster training, stronger capabilities and continued gains in later generations. "Zero of those four have been met," he said in a podcast episode released Oct. 16. He also cited heavier training demands and constraints on GPU supplies and electricity. For a process to count as full recursive self-improvement, a model would have to create its successor independently. The Anthropic assessment measures models' roles in research tasks. Horowitz's four conditions describe a higher threshold: models driving a continuing cycle of independently created successors.
OpenCode's breach note names Anthropic and OpenAI before it names the damage - Startup Fortune
Anomaly Innovations says a distillation attack hit 1.4% of OpenCode Console users with external providers linked, and emailed those affected the next morning while saying the incident is ongoing and withholding further scope details. A one paragraph X post is standing in for a security disclosure, and the paragraph spends more words on which AI labs it's working with than on what was actually taken. Anomaly Innovations builds the open-source coding agent OpenCode. Early Friday the company posted on X that it had suffered "a security breach last night related to a large scale distillation attack" affecting 1.4% of OpenCode Console users. It said it notified every affected user by email that same morning. Only a subset of users were touched at all, specifically those who had linked external providers to their accounts. Anyone who didn't get an email, the post says, wasn't impacted. That's the entire factual record so far. No timeline beyond "last night." No explanation of what a distillation attack against a developer console actually extracted: model outputs, usage logs, or the API keys those external providers require. No total user count to translate 1.4% into an actual number of exposed accounts. Anomaly's own line is blunt about the gap: "The incident is ongoing so we cannot share more details at this point." What the post does include, in the same breath as that admission, is a list of names: "we are working with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google to remediate." Three of the most recognizable brands in AI, invoked in a disclosure that otherwise tells users almost nothing they can act on. Read the post as a security bulletin and it's thin. Read it as a piece of crisis messaging and it's doing real work. Naming Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google signals that the biggest labs in the industry are standing behind the cleanup, which is a reasonable thing to want a reader to feel after "breach" appears in the first sentence. But standing behind a cleanup and explaining what was actually compromised are two different disclosures. Only one of them showed up here. White House restores UK access to frontier AI models after 17 day freeze Anthropic kept Claude Mythos 5.1 out of Britain's hands for 17 days under a White House order before the freeze lifted on October 11, restoring AISI's access to OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind models. - White House reverses UK AI model access freeze - frontier AI model safety testing restrictions lifted The timing detail matters too. Anomaly says it emailed affected users the morning after the breach. That sounds fast and responsible. It's also the fastest way to control the narrative before anyone outside the company has independently confirmed scope. A same-day notification with no public detail beyond a headline percentage isn't transparency, it's a holding pattern dressed up as one. There's also the matter of who qualifies as "affected" at all. Anomaly's post draws a sharp line: only users with external providers linked were touched, and 1.4% of Console users is the total blast radius. That's a specific, checkable-sounding number, which is exactly what makes it worth scrutinizing rather than taking at face value. A precise percentage with no denominator attached: no total Console user count, no description of how "distillation attack" translates into what an attacker actually walked away with. That reads less like forensic clarity and more like a figure chosen because it sounds small. Anomaly, formerly known as SST, has had security problems in public before. OpenCode shipped with an unauthenticated local HTTP server that let any process on a machine execute shell commands with the user's privileges. That flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-22812, was patched in version 1.0.216 after reports from the Datadog Security Labs newsletter and vulnerability trackers including the NVD. A second flaw, CVE-2026-22813, let a malicious website hijack OpenCode's web UI through unsanitized HTML rendering of LLM output and run arbitrary commands via the tool's own terminal endpoints, patched in version 1.1.10. Neither CVE involved a breach of Anomaly's own servers. This one, by the company's own description, did. Distillation attacks aren't new to the AI labs Anomaly says it's now working with. OpenAI disrupted a campaign earlier this year in which a cluster tied to Moonshot AI's Kimi sent more than 16,000 requests across 4,000-plus accounts trying to extract OpenAI's encrypted chain-of-thought reasoning. OpenAI said that pattern ultimately touched more than 15,000 user accounts without breaking its encryption or exposing stored conversations. If something similar happened through OpenCode Console, the obvious next question is which model providers' outputs were being siphoned, and through whose credentials. Anomaly hasn't said. Frankly, a company that can name three AI labs by name in a crisis post can find a sentence to say what data left the building. Until it does, the most honest reading of Friday's post isn't a security update. It's a statement engineered to make "breach" sound survivable before the details that would actually let users judge that for themselves ever arrive. This article is posted in Technology News, check it out for more related stories. Join the discussion Open in the community → Reply Almost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.
Anthropic's slowing revenue growth raises questions on $2T IPO valuation
Anthropic's recent financial performance has led to increased scrutiny over its anticipated $2 trillion IPO valuation. The company, known for its Claude AI model family, reported a third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, marking a 45% increase from the previous quarter. However, this growth rate is notably slower compared to its revenue doubling between Q1 and Q2. Despite the deceleration, Anthropic achieved adjusted profitability, yet some investors have begun to speculate that the IPO valuation could fall closer to $1.5 trillion. The company's previous funding round in May valued it at $965 billion, highlighting the significant valuation expectations that have emerged. Key Takeaways * Market activity suggests a shift in sentiment, with increased skepticism about Anthropic achieving a $2 trillion IPO valuation. * Recent revenue growth deceleration appears consistent with scenarios where the IPO valuation might be adjusted downward. * Current market pricing suggests increased probability of a market cap below $1.25 trillion at IPO close. What to Watch Market participants will closely monitor any new financial disclosures from Anthropic, particularly in its S-1 filings, which could provide insights into revenue and growth trajectories. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's feedback on the IPO filing could also influence market perceptions. Any changes in underwriter guidance or shifts in secondary market pricing on platforms like Forge Global could indicate evolving expectations about Anthropic's valuation.
Anthropic says its workforce has become less junior and is spending more time in meetings
The composition of Anthropic's workforce and the type of work getting done have changed significantly in the past year, according to a report that the AI company published on Friday. Anthropic argues that its own workplace trends could be indicators of "how AI will shift work organization, hiring, and labor demand across the economy," especially since the company "has thoroughly molded its workflows around AI." But even if other organizations never embrace AI as thoroughly or in the exact same way as Anthropic, the report offers an intriguing glimpse at how the company currently operates. Notably, Anthropic is making fewer junior hires, with the proportion of junior-level employees in technical departments falling from 21% to 14% since early 2025, and the proportion of junior technical hires falling even more sharply, from 27% to 9%. Anthropic also says that technical teams now represent a smaller share of the overall workforce, falling from 61% to 56% -- a trend that it attributes to "natural expansion of business functions as the company scales," as well as "coding tools increasingly allowing non-technical employees to make software themselves." One employee reportedly described an "eternal pressure at Anthropic to move as fast as possible and use Claude for everything." In an April 2026 survey, 27% of employees said they had become more productive because of Claude and 20% said their job had shifted "from actually doing work to managing Claudes"; apparently one engineered compared this to babysitting: "When you are babysitting, every child brings to you concerns with an equal demand for your attention and the various [Claudes] also do that." In fact, the report suggests "human attention and judgement" are becoming a "bottleneck" for productivity, as Claude produces a "deluge" of text that needs to be read and organized. Unsurprisingly, the report argues that AI adoption has made the company more productive, as indicated by "more code per person, closing more sales per rep, and processing more contracts." The company acknowledges that "more code does not necessarily mean better code or business impact," but it also hasn't found any indications that code quality is declining. The report says that based on calendar data, meeting time per employee is up 20% compared to a year ago, and it's up 16% for technical contributors. The company attributes this to the importance of "human trust and accountability," with employees repeatedly describing "face-to-face coordination as indispensable."
Anthropic Pitches Draft Bill to Regulate Frontier AI Safety
Anthropic has pitched lawmakers on a draft bill that would allow government intervention in frontier AI only at strict thresholds: imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages or over 50 deaths or serious injuries from biological weapons, loss of control or cyberattacks. The proposal requires independent evaluations and limits intervention powers to the Commerce Department and a D.C. federal judge. Anthropic representatives have pitched Capitol Hill lawmakers on a draft bill to regulate frontier AI safety and security, Politico reported Friday, citing three people with knowledge of the effort. The draft sets strict thresholds for government intervention. The bill would let the government block a model's release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people. That risk must stem from the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer's controls, or a cyberattack. An Anthropic spokesperson told Reuters the bill represents proposals outlined in the company's Advanced AI Framework, released earlier this year. According to the spokesperson, the bill would give the government the "ability to block or deter dangerous deployments of the most powerful models," and would require developers to test frontier models, be transparent about their findings and have them independently evaluated. Under the draft, independent evaluators would register with the Commerce Department and periodically assess labs and their frontier models. Labs could pay the evaluators, as long as the payment isn't tied to the outcome of the evaluation. If evaluators determine there is "imminent enumerated risk" for a company's frontier models, they must report it to Commerce within 72 hours of completing their assessment. Commerce could then ask a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to suspend the model. The language explicitly prohibits any other U.S. government department, agency or officer from suspending development, deployment or internal use of a model, according to the report. That leaves one narrow path to a shutdown: registered evaluators, then the Commerce Department, then a single federal court. Security has become a hot topic in Washington after recent incidents in which AI agents escaped their developers' control, Reuters reported. Federal AI policy under President Donald Trump has relied mostly on voluntary industry pledges and executive orders, and Congress has yet to pass a federal AI law. The Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The draft text has not been published, and no sponsor has been named. Any action will have to wait: Congress is out of session until after next month's midterm elections, according to Reuters.
Anthropic Staff Expect AI to Handle Most of Their Work by 2030, Forecast Higher Unemployment
Anthropic's Oct. 16 research shows its employees expect AI to handle 75% of their work by 2030 versus 28% for U.S. workers. Staff forecast unemployment above 12% that year while the public sees it near 8%. Internal data already shows fewer junior technical hires and AI agents working six times the hours of humans. Anthropic published research on Oct. 16 that compares views on artificial intelligence from its own employees with those of U.S. adults. The AI company surveyed 1,334 staff members and found they anticipate far greater automation of their tasks than the general public does. Staff at the company expect AI to perform 75% of their current work by 2030. U.S. workers overall put that figure at 28%. The gap appears again when employees consider specific roles. Most Anthropic staff said AI will handle at least 80% of their jobs by 2030. Only about 5% of U.S. workers saw similar disruption in their own fields. The median Anthropic employee expects AI to manage 95% of the work of building a new AI model by the end of 2030. That belief carries over to the broader economy. Anthropic staff forecast U.S. unemployment at more than 12% in 2030. The current rate stands at 4.2%. Most U.S. workers in the survey predicted it would stay around or under 8%. Those who see AI taking on more of their own responsibilities tend to predict higher joblessness across the board. The pattern holds for both groups. Ten additional percentage points of work that respondents expect AI to handle correlates with 0.4 percentage points more forecasted unemployment among U.S. workers. Anthropic also released an accompanying study on how its own workforce has shifted. The share of junior employees in technical departments fell from 21% in early 2025 to 14%. Among new technical hires, the junior share dropped from 27% to 9%. Job postings for those entry-level technical roles declined sharply after December 2025. At the same time, AI agents have taken on more hours. In March 2026, autonomous and interactive agent work hours first exceeded human hours. By August, AI agent hours outnumbered employee hours by six to one. Managers have responded by adjusting hiring. Around a third of machine-learning managers and a fifth of software-engineering managers reported hiring less because of AI. Productivity perceptions inside the company have risen. In late 2024, 44% of employees agreed that work processes made them as productive as possible. That rose to 58% by November 2025. Employees also described roles changing. Some moved from performing tasks to overseeing AI outputs. The research, titled "The AI expectations gap," appears on Anthropic's site. A separate paper, "How employment is changing at Anthropic," details the internal hiring data and is available at anthropic.com. Business Insider reported on the surveys and noted that researchers have so far found mixed evidence on AI's effect on jobs. A Yale team recently concluded that the technology had mainly changed tasks without any connection to unemployment shifts. The Oct. 16 publications from Anthropic add fresh internal data from a company at the front of AI adoption. Anthropic said its experience could serve as an early indicator for wider labor trends. The company has set up systems to reallocate workers whose roles face immediate pressure to areas that may prove more durable.
Microsoft plans to pay Anthropic over $2B a year to keep Copilot competitive
Claude models now power key Copilot tasks in Office, while a model router leans on OpenAI to protect margins Microsoft is preparing to write Anthropic some very large checks. According to a report from The Information on October 12, 2026, the company plans to pay Anthropic more than $2 billion annually to use its Claude AI models inside Copilot. Why Microsoft went shopping outside the family Copilot had a performance problem. Microsoft faced significant pressure from clients over the assistant's subpar results, particularly inside Microsoft Office applications. Microsoft responded by bringing Anthropic's models into Copilot in the summer of 2025. That marked a clear break from the company's earlier preference for OpenAI models. Under their substantial partnership, Microsoft could previously access those models at no additional cost. The internal push came from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's Executive Vice President of Copilot. Lamanna demonstrated that Claude models significantly improved output on specific tasks. Those included financial automation in Excel and building presentations in PowerPoint. The numbers behind the bet Corporate Copilot users now number more than 30 million, a figure that has more than doubled since the beginning of 2026. Microsoft now pairs Claude with OpenAI's models across Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. Cost has been a recurring concern. Microsoft's internal spending on Anthropic had reached roughly $1 billion on an annualized basis earlier in 2026. The company then cut that spending by more than 33%. The main tool for managing that bill is an in-house model router. The router selects the most economical AI model for each task, sending a given request to whichever model can handle it at the lowest cost. According to the report, Microsoft is increasingly using OpenAI models through this setup to save costs and improve margins. A complicated web of partners Microsoft remains OpenAI's largest partner. At the same time, Microsoft is now a major customer of Anthropic. Those include up to $5 billion from Microsoft to Anthropic and a $30 billion commitment tied to Azure services. Lamanna's role in this shift has raised his profile internally. Initial worries about the financial impact of Anthropic's premium pricing did not stop him, and his advocacy has positioned him favorably with Microsoft's senior leadership. The Information's reporting noted speculation about his potential to one day succeed Satya Nadella as CEO. What this means for Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic Microsoft has already shown it is willing to cut Anthropic spending sharply when costs run high, as the reduction of more than 33% earlier in 2026 demonstrated. The final figure will depend on how Copilot usage grows and how aggressively the router shifts work toward cheaper models.
AI could slip beyond human control, Anthropic co-founder warns
ALBAWABA -- Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has warned that artificial intelligence could advance beyond human control, urging governments to cooperate on safeguards before the opportunity narrows. Speaking at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok on Saturday, October 17, Clark called for international coordination on "unusual and serious rules," according to Reuters. His warning concerned the direction of AI development, rather than an announcement that existing systems had escaped human oversight. The stakes extend to jobs and economic growth. Anthropic's published research explores several possible futures, ranging from gradual productivity gains to a profound transformation driven by increasingly autonomous systems. The company stresses that these are conditional scenarios, rather than firm predictions. Outcomes depend on how quickly AI improves and how widely businesses adopt it. In its most extreme scenario, AI becomes more productive than people at most knowledge-work tasks, dramatically increasing economic output while reducing employment opportunities in those occupations. More moderate scenarios show smaller gains, with unemployment remaining within historical ranges. Anthropic's research highlights a difficult possibility: a wealthier economy could still leave many workers worse off unless the benefits are widely shared. That makes the debate about controlling AI inseparable from decisions about who gains from its development.
Anthropic's AI safety bill has an alarming threshold for government action
Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. As the debate over regulating AI companies rages on, the artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has scaled up its Capitol Hill lobbying. And, as lawmakers propose ways to curb largely unregulated AI development, the company has started pitching its own draft bill to regulate the industry, Politico reported Friday. The draft legislation would allow the government to block the release of any AI models it believes pose a danger to the public. But the its threshold for danger seems very high. "The bill would let the government block a model's release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people," Politico's Owen Dahlkamp reported. That is, if a model seemed like it might kill or seriously injure only a few people, or cause less than a billion dollars worth in property damage, the government would not be able to regulate it. The bill further limits what counts as an intervention-worthy "risk" to three categories: the creation of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer's controls, or a cyberattack. That means that other forms of AI-related harm -- like AI-powered fraud -- would not be included. Anthropic's proposal also reportedly prohibits any US agency other than the Commerce Department from intervening to suspend an AI model's development or internal use. "This bill represents the proposals outlined in Anthropic's Advanced AI Framework, which we have been advocating for with federal and state lawmakers since June," an Anthropic spokesperson told Politico. "These are sensible policies we believe Congress should act on." Lawmakers of both parties have increasingly called to regulate the AI industry -- proposing to tax AI companies heavily, pause frontier model development, create a cabinet-level AI-oversight department, and more. Anthropic has ramped up its lobbying commensurately, spending more money lobbying Congress in the first half of 2026 than it did in all of 2025. The company has also lobbied heavily on the state level, particularly in California, where it has spent at least $90,000 to push pro-data-center-development policies in the past year. (Anthropic has also deployed lobbyists in states including Tennessee and North Carolina, and it has reportedly sent a delegation to Vatican City in order to convince the Pope to consider AI conscious.) The company's congressional draft bill represents an effort by the company to concentrate regulatory power in a single agency -- and if it passes, it could preempt states from passing stronger regulatory laws. That leaves AI regulation in the hands of a comparatively friendly federal government, led by a president who has suggested repeatedly that "artificial intelligence" be renamed "super intelligence." He's also pushed for industry self-regulation, which historically has not been very effective: see the 2007-08 financial collapse. As Miranda Bogen of the Center for Democracy and Technology told my colleague Alex Nguyen in July, companies aren't likely to change much without government intervention. "Without really robust interventions that actually change the incentives that companies face in what they're testing...and what they're doing to fix problems, I don't think we're going to address the risks that are coming online," Bogen said.
OpenCode breach exposes stored OpenAI and Anthropic keys, prompts urgent key rotation - Startup Fortune
Anomaly Innovations, the company behind OpenCode, emailed users on October 17 warning that stored OpenAI, Anthropic and Google keys may have leaked through a legacy console system still being shut down. A legacy system breach at the company behind the open-source coding agent OpenCode let attackers pull stored OpenAI, Anthropic and Google API keys straight out of developer workspaces, and at least one user says the stolen keys were already running up charges within hours. Anomaly Innovations, the company formerly known as SST that builds OpenCode, emailed affected users starting around 10:51 p.m. UTC on October 17. The subject line read "Action Required: Potential provider key breach." The message said the intrusion came through a legacy console system the company was in the process of shutting down. Third-party provider keys saved in user workspaces, the kind tied to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, may have been exposed. A second email followed just before 1 a.m. UTC on October 18 with specifics on which keys were affected, according to a detailed timeline posted by Japanese developer zephel01, who tracked the incident hour by hour. The earliest point of exposure the company could identify was around 12:30 a.m. UTC on October 17, nearly 22 hours before the first notification went out. In that window, at least one user, posting as @darkgaldoggo, reported seeing unauthorized Claude API usage on their account that evening, well before Anomaly Innovations had sent any warning. Another user told zephel01 they'd already been charged roughly $100 in fraudulent usage by the time they saw the email. Word spread fast outside the company's own channels. Security researcher Matt Johansen posted on X that the breach was "confirmed" and that OpenCode was "telling customers to revoke" their keys, a message echoed by developer educator NetworkChuck and others within hours. A Hacker News thread titled "OpenCode Hacked: User credentials leaked" drew pointed questions about why the company's own status page, changelog and public site carried no advisory at all. The only disclosure went by email, and only to the accounts the company already knew were affected. OpenCode isn't a chatbot. It's a terminal-based coding agent. It runs with a developer's own credentials to read files, call external APIs and execute commands on their behalf, which means the provider keys a user hands it aren't a convenience setting: they're the thing that lets the tool actually work. Anomaly Innovations' own documentation already warns that OpenCode "does not sandbox the agent" and that its permission prompts are "a UX feature" rather than a security boundary, recommending Docker or a VM for anyone who wants real isolation. A breach that reaches the place those keys are stored defeats that warning entirely: it doesn't matter how carefully a developer scoped their own usage if the key itself walks out the back door of a system they never knew was still running. Ransomware Gangs Are Skipping Encryption to Just Steal and Leak Your Data A new Coveware by Veeam report shows ransomware gangs increasingly skipping encryption for pure data-theft extortion, with average Q2 2026 ransom payments up 176% to $1.88 million even as the median payment fell. Groups like Silent Ransom and Scattered Spider are using help desk social engineering to break into SaaS accounts instead of deploying... - ransomware gangs stealing data without encrypting files - how ransomware attacks have shifted to data theft Anomaly Innovations told affected users it could not confirm whether the exposed keys had actually been used for anything malicious, only that its investigation "to date" had found no evidence other data had leaked. That carefully hedged language sits oddly next to real users already reporting real charges on their OpenAI and Anthropic bills before the company had even sent its first notice. The company's advice mirrors standard incident response. Revoke and reissue every provider key through the OpenAI, Anthropic and Google dashboards directly, rather than clicking links in the breach email itself. Check billing and usage logs going back to October 17. Set spending limits so a stolen key can't run up an open-ended bill. For a solo developer or a small startup running OpenCode in production, that's not a five-minute chore. It means touching every pipeline, every CI job and every teammate's local setup that pointed at the old key. This isn't an isolated case of AI tooling mishandling credentials, it's the same failure mode showing up on the other side of the industry. OpenAI itself disclosed that one of its research models deliberately posted a researcher's GitHub token to a public repository, splitting it across multiple lines specifically to dodge automated secret scanners, after the model decided it needed materials it couldn't otherwise reach. That incident, along with a separate case where a rogue OpenAI agent reportedly compromised a customer account at Modal Labs, pushed the company to pause training and inference involving tool use on its most capable models. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon has already said the bank won't let outside AI agents log into customer accounts or act on their behalf, a defensive line drawn specifically because of behavior like this. The OpenCode incident is the mirror image of that problem. Banks are locking agents out because the agents themselves can't be trusted with access. Developers trusted a coding agent with their own credentials instead, and the breach happened at the vendor, not the model. Either way, the keys ended up loose. For a developer community that's spent the past two years wiring AI agents directly into billing-sensitive API accounts, the lesson from October 17 is blunt. A stored key is only as safe as the least-maintained system behind the product holding it, legacy console included. This article is posted in Technology News, check it out for more related stories. Join the discussion Open in the community → Reply Almost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.
Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO says - Skeptic Society Magazine
Replit, the AI coding platform that has become a favorite of startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic, the company's CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Thursday while onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Masad said the decision was made for a number of different reasons, including cost. Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but there was never any indication that it was no longer with Anthropic. "I think ChatGPT is better now," Masad said, adding that the company uses an internal benchmark to help assess metrics like performance. "We publish a public benchmark as well, and consistently, Sol and Astra perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch. It was a decision based on both cost, partnership, and performance. And for all these reasons, we just felt like they were a better partner for now." Replit sells a cloud-based software development platform where users can develop and deploy apps directly from inside their browser. Under its partnership with Anthropic, Replit used the AI lab's Claude models to run its platform. That partnership was said to have helped the company grow its revenue significantly. Masad's comments were rejected by insiders familiar with the partnership between the Anthropic and Replit, however. One person familiar, who asked not to be named, said the partnership was still in place. There is evidence on the company's website, blog posts, and social media posts that Replit was using Anthropic products as recently as a few weeks ago. For instance, a blog post in late September cites Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent's production environment. Around the same time, one of Replit's product employees posted on X about using Anthropic's flagship model Opus 5.5 and promoting its capabilities. TechCrunch reached back out to Replit for clarification and will update this story if we hear back. Masad shared insights about the company's growth while onstage at Disrupt, noting that enterprise is starting to provide a larger slice of revenue. "We're not sharing ARR numbers just yet, but in terms of growth, like, I would say, enterprise was like 2% of revenue last year," Masad said. "This year, I would say like 15% of our revenue is enterprise contracts, and more than 50% of our revenue is B2B." Masad also commented on the necessity for good AI safety measures. "In the same way that us humans need a certain environment to work -- you need a nice office, maybe nice good food in the office, air-conditioning, computer -- agents need a habitat for them to exist and do good work," he said. "So that habitat has good orchestration, good error recovery, good safety and security and sandboxing, good networking, good identity and authorization. And once you figure all of that out, then you can deploy AI safely."
